Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Slate’s Series on Recovered Report Cards

Posted by
Felice Batlan

Late last year, Paul Lukas from Slate released a series of articles chronicling his discovery of old report cards from a girl’strade school in New York City and the subsequent search to return the cards tothe students’ families. Lukas discovered
the old report cards in 1996 sitting in a box of soon-to-be discarded materials
at Stuyvesant High School. Many of the
report cards dated back to the early 1900’s so Lukas kept the report cards
sensing that they had significant historical value. More like detailed school records, the cards
contained information including the girls’ subsequent employment history, correspondence from school personnel, and notes about the girls from teachers, social
workers, and doctors. Many of the girls
were from immigrant families, but the cards revealed that there were also black
students, one Hispanic, and one Native American student, each marked with a
black dot, which Lukas believes to be a warning system to protect the students
from job discrimination. In the series, Lukas
threads the stories of several girls together to give a glimpse of the nature
of the garment industry in which most of the girls found themselves: “difficult,
usually short-term, and almost always low-paying.” My own research on legal aid
also reveals that smaller manufacturers and jobbers also failed to pay women’s
wages entirely. That the girls’
employment stories were so meticulously documented by the school’s placement
office makes Lukas’ find that much more important. Lukas’ intuition about keeping the cards for
their historical value was spot-on as what emerges from his discovery is a rich
source of immigrant, education, and working class history. A number of these documents are now available
to view on-line.